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ABSTRACT
Like with Haute Couture, in political science there are also fashions. In the 1990s party system change was the flavour of the day, and Peter Mair its uttermost pontiff. The popularity of the topic fadde away with the new century, especially after the 2008 Great Recession made buzzwords like populism and democratic backsliding, among others, more fashionable. Departing from Mair’s, 2001 book chapter on the topic, and using Mair’s conceptual and methodological tools, this paper revisits the sister concepts of party system freezing and party system change, showing to what extent fears about never-ending change and party system collapse are really true. While cleavage structures have changed, electorates are in disarray, and parties are in constant turmoil, party system change in Western Europe is still the exception (e.g. Ireland), rather than the rule.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof. Ingrid van Biezen (University of Leiden), Prof. Zsolt Enyedi (Central European University) and, especially, Prof. Tim Haughton (University of Birmingham) for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this lecture. All remaining errors are my own.
Notes
1 The 2022 Peter Mair Lecture took place in a deconsecrated chapel at the South East Technological University (Waterford, Ireland).
2 This is not to say that Peter was always infallible, as I show with Enyedi (2022) in volume 37, number 2 of this very same journal.
3 At least in comparison to other Peter’s works: his 1995 ‘cartel party’ article has more than 5250 citations, his 1990 award-winning book with Stefano Bartolini almost 2700, and his 1997 volume on ‘Party System Change’ around 2100 – just to name a few examples.
4 Lipset and Rokkan’s (Citation1967) book also included, for examples, chapters on New Zealand and the United States.
5 This should concurrently include three different elements: empirical or structural, normative or attitudinal, organizational or institutional (Bartolini, Citation2005; Deegan-Krause, Citation2006).
6 Although, as we will see later on, in some countries (e.g., 2017 France, 2020 Ireland, 1994 and 2013 Italy) they might coincide.
7 From Powell and Tucker (Citation2014) to Lago and Torcal (Citation2020), although the first ones to do so – even if usually forgotten – were Rose and Munro in Citation2003.
8 See also Casal Bértoa, Enyedi, and Mölder (Citation2022).
9 Cited, according to google scholar, 903 times at the time of delivering this lecture.
10 The combination of these three terms to defined party system institutionalization can be found for the first time in an article summarizing my own PhD. thesis (Casal Bértoa, Citation2012, see also Casal Bértoa, Citation2019).
11 A conceptual distinction I did not notice at the time, I must confess.
12 Other scholars like Mainwaring (Citation2018), who talks about stability (towards the past) and predictability (towards the future), seem to have subsequently followed this path.
13 Other countries (e.g., Italy, San Marino, Germany, France) present data gaps in the 1930s, 1940s or 1960s.
14 Using this periodization has also another advantage: it allows us to maximize the number of countries as Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden and the United Kingdom only democratized (i.e., introduced universal male suffrage) after WWI. Also, Ireland only got independence in 1922. Secondly, it makes sure no empty decade is left in the calculations, as for Austria.
15 The 2022 French presidential and legislative elections are perhaps the clearest example. But think also about recent elections in my own country, Spain (Rodríguez-Teruel, Barberà, Barrio, & Casal Bértoa, Citation2018).
16 For the sake of argument as well as graphical representation, both Christian-democratic and Conservative parties have been merged.
17 The direction of which is not always clear (see Roberts & Wibbels, Citation1999; Mair, Citation1997; Tavits, Citation2008).
18 Understood ‘as those that first began to contest elections no earlier than 1960 and that poll at least 1 per cent in one election’ (Gallagher et al., Citation2011, p. 308). For an alternative definition of newness, please see Sikk (Citation2005) or, more recently, Haughton and Deegan-Krause (Citation2020).
19 Only in Ireland such support has increased 8 times since the 1960s.
20 With a loss of 0.62 points after the last 2020 parliamentary elections, passing from being considered one of the most over-institutionalised party systems in Europe to almost lose such condition.
21 It was first presented in a book chapter published a year earlier (Mair, Citation1996).
22 Not to talk about the question of what an ‘anti-system’ party is (Zulianello, Citation2018).
23 Not much has been done since then though.
24 For a similar argument, please see chapter 8 in Casal Bértoa and Enyedi (Citation2021).
25 Not only the threshold between moderate and polarized pluralism was arbitrary, there was also the issue of how to identify a predominant party system (Mair, Citation2006; Nwokora & Pelizzo, Citation2014).
26 Not even consider the possibility of ‘mixed types’.
27 This notion builds on Peter’s two favourite political scientists: one Italian (Sartori), another Norwegian (Rokkan) who respectively used ‘ideology’ and ‘government alternatives’ to elaborate their party system typologies (Mair, Citation1997, Citation2001).
28 Via – from more stable to less – ‘two-party’, ‘two-bloc’, ‘two-plus-one’, ‘centre-based’, ‘tripolar’.
29 Two-party in Greece, two-bloc in the French and Icelandic cases.
30 Substituted, in the case of Greece, for a two-bloc one just a couple of years later, as shown in the next section.
31 For a similar approach, please also see Mair (Citation1983).
32 Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco, which democratized only in the early 1990s, are not included.
33 None of them adjacent, except in Luxembourg and Spain.
34 Luciano Bardi dixit.
35 For a comparison of how different economic crises (1929, 1973 and 2008) impacted party system change, please see Casal Bértoa and Weber (Citation2019).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fernando Casal Bértoa
Fernando Casal Bértoa is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). He did his PhD. at the European University Institute (Florence) and was Peter Mair’s penultimate student to defend. Their posthumously published chapter on party system institutionalization in post-communist Europe (Citation2013), translated into both Polish and Spanish, set in motion the quantitative operationalization of party system closure index. Fernando Casal Bértoa, either alone (Citation2014, Citation2018) or with Enyedi (Citation2014, Citation2018, Citation2020, Citation2022), has continued Mair’s work on issues like cleavages, electoral volatility party system closure, post-communist instability or bipolarization. He is co-editor of Party Politics and Democracy in Europe: Essays in Honour of Peter Mair with Ferdinand Müller-Rommel (Routledge) and Partidos, Sistema de Partidos y Democracia. La Obra Esencial de Peter Mair (EUDEBA).